so ive been putting together a go-kit for our county ARES group and the whole power question is killing me. we had a deployment last year where someone showed up with a cheap harbor freight 2000w generator and the noise floor on 40m was absolutely terrible, like S7 noise across the whole band. killed us for most of the night until we figured out what was going on.

now im trying to plan something better for the next exercise. thinking about running off a 100ah lifepo4 battery with a 40w solar panel for daytime and then a proper inverter generator for nighttime or heavy loads. the radios we're using are mostly IC-7300s and a couple D710s for the VHF side so it's not a massive power draw but still. anyone dealt with this for multi-day ops where you cant just run home and grab stuff if something goes wrong

also the antenna situation is a whole other headache. we've been using a mix of random end-feds with a 9:1 unun and one guy has a buddipole he swears by but honestly it takes him like 45 minutes to set up every single time. looking for something that can go up fast and still be actually useful on 40 and 20, not just technically resonant.

the generator noise thing is super common and usually its a grounding issue more than the genny itself being garbage. even the honda eu2200i will hash up your bands if you dont bond the frame to a real earth ground. throw a ground rod in and run a wire to the frame before you start cursing the equipment. that said yeah the cheap open frame generators are way worse and i wouldnt bother trying to fix one of those for serious comms work.

for your power setup honestly the lifepo4 plus solar is the right call for anything under maybe 48 hours. i run a 120ah battleborn with a 100w panel and a victron mppt controller and it handles my 7300 all day no problem even with moderate tx duty cycle. key thing is getting the mppt controller right, the cheap pwm ones waste a lot of potential in partial shade which is basically always the case in field conditions.

on the antenna question have you looked at the packtenna random wire kits or the chameleon emcomm ii? the chameleon goes up fast once you know it and it actually works, i wouldnt trust a buddipole on 40 without extensions and then its not fast anymore either. nothing beats a simple 40m dipole at 25 feet for actual performance but for quick deployment the endfed through a decent 49:1 is pretty hard to beat if you trim it for the bands you care about.

yeah we had almost the exact same generator problem at a public service event a few years back. turns out the guy's genny had a floating neutral and it was just pumping crud everywhere. bonding fixed most of it but we ended up just running the HF stuff off batteries the rest of the event and only using the generator for the laptop and the APRS setup which didnt care as much.

one thing i'll add — whatever battery system you settle on, make sure everybody in the group actually knows how to use it. sounds dumb but we had a new member nearly run a 100ah agm flat down to nothing because he didn't realize the radio was pulling more than expected and there was no low voltage cutoff on the setup. lifepo4 is more forgiving but still, a simple battery monitor on the panel saves headaches. the victron bmv series is what most of our guys use now, accurate and you can actually trust the state of charge readout unlike those cheap percentage meters.